Congratulations on the publication of your article! Is your PR placement online, in print or both? Have you emailed it to the right people and broadcast it far and wide on social media? PR placements play a vital role, but limited bandwidth and a greater number of competitors facing the same concerns means that audiences are smaller, so you’ll have to push more buttons to have the same effect as yesteryear.

Resend, and make it resendable

The go-to way of spreading messages for PR firms and just about everyone else who want to be heard is of course online, and that of course means efficiently using the right social media platforms. Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are the key places to focus on. Make sure to tap the right influencers for enhancing your key message in your placement, so a wider range of followers and potential customers can be reached. Both quality and quantity matter in terms of platforms for effectively dispersing matters whenever you are extending the reach of an article, advertorial, advertisement or other campaign material with a message people want to hear or you want them to hear.

Go ahead, paraphrase

Short and effective rewrites are easy ways of enhancing main messages with a minimum amount of work that goes far, and maximizes SEO potential, while drawing a greater range of data seekers to your article. Just about everything except for the link can be worded differently. Similarly, original 1-2 sentence summaries with a link to the original article can be placed on various social media sites to boost readership.

Your good work on display

In a world logged on, an unplugged, classic and professional approach stands out in unique and powerful ways. Easels, frames for walls and portfolios are just a few ways of enhancing easy and elegant access to attractively presented PR placements, without needing to open your smartphone or laptop.

Stories are more easily remembered than statistics and facts alone. Stories stimulate our neural activity. Stories also impact the brain’s sensory cortex. Such are just a few facts related to how stories do a better job than facts alone (but, of course, still very much need them). The union of facts and heart-stirring narratives is called brand storytelling, a phenomenon rapidly gaining currency among digital marketers, aka digital storytellers and content marketers.

The future of marketing

Brand storytelling capitalizes on and represents the nearly inevitable outcome of several trends, including buyers trusting information coming from fellow customers than from companies, the tendency to edit out advertisements from daily news feeds and streaming sites, the quest for authenticity in brands, decreasing brand loyalty, and the nature of the trend-setting, digital-native Gen Z.

Sponsoring values, not products

Advertisers are rebranding themselves as value-focused, which has always been be a tough sell. Creating interest in goods and services without blatantly looking like you’re selling them may not be a new challenge, but is an increasingly relevant one to meet in a world awash with information and multiple channels for exposure. Influencers are found attractive by their followers for their character and integrity, not their over loyalty to particular brands, let alone for being mouthpieces for sales and specials of the day.

There’s no publicity like free publicity

If the best stories write themselves, the most unscripted of plot twists can have the happiest of endings in terms of PR value. Which is to say, the best things in life are free. When a very obviously 21st-century coffee cup looking like it was from Starbucks worked itself into a bar scene from the premium streaming series “Game of Thrones” the gargantuan error generated for Starbucks what one industry expert valued to be no less than US$2.3 billion in free advertising. Some stories are too good to be true, and the great ones are too serendipitous to have been made up.

Many key trends look ready to coalesce in ways that should make data more easily accessible and better organized. Only that for every innovative step forward, more questions and disruption is caused as well. What’s new? Well, plenty, actually. Voice search, led by the rise of Alexa and Google Home, is ready for big-time liftoff and will have interesting ramifications for SEO – which remains something both unquantified and essential for businesses. The same goes for video, which is becoming more popular on websites but is just as susceptible to the unpredictable, shifting nature of SEO.

A world of opportunity for storytellers

For public relations professionals, this presents the usual challenge and opportunity: for those with the right message and networks for amplifying messages, the rewards are great. Deeper, better content that connects meaningfully with buyers, in particular niches, remains essential and is more important than ever. Beyond the reach of big data and reaching target audiences, developing a rapport still matters, and remains built on trust and experience. This takes a proven track record more than algorithms and mere potential. What matters is data maturity: it takes time and energy to isolate trends and optimize today’s great opportunities for message sharing and profit.

In search of truths

This need for authenticity and balance in a world more marked by chance is well represented in the rise of the digital platforms for many traditional media that now have more online that hard-copy subscriptions. The successful shift has solidified and raised the standing of classic institutions such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. Classical influencers still have their role in times threatened by fake news, and big data, which gives even larger importance to the need for veracity.

The young people of the world know what they want and know where they can get it. This trend will only increase, as the newest generation grows up. Online marketers not tuned into the call of Generation Z’s growing legions of focused, often female online shoppers, entertainment seekers and social media users risk losing out to, well, the future, actually…

Currying favor, spinning stories

The boldness and brevity of Gen Z was sportily displayed by one spritely girl who upon discovering that Stephen Curry’s latest line of trainers were available only for boys, personally appealed to the NBA superstar in a Tweet sweetly succinct, imploring him to take action. The forthrightness and connection the young storyteller forged proved irresistible and the Golden State Warriors player Tweeted back saying he had arranged for his young fan to attend an upcoming home game. She did, and was presented a pair of custom-made Curry 5s, along with a promise that she’d be among the first to try out the new Curry 6s when they debut.

Beyond brand awareness

In addition to not being shy about putting CEO-types in their place, girls are giving big brands a challenging time by being more willing to buy off-brand and generic products, patronizing companies like Kirkland and Amazon Essentials. Brands are in better shape on another score though, as long as they’ve got logistics covered: almost half of Gen Z girls said that their top motivational factor for buying clothes online was fast and free delivery.

Get ready, providers of products and services and the PR firms supporting them: Gen Z is entering the workforce and will be shopping online more and more in years to come.

Language alone won’t help content marketers win and retain customers. Telling the kind of story that will truly resonate with online buyers and potential ones is also a numbers game. Data is everywhere, and fascinating co-relations are emerging all the time. The way to make sense of these trends requires an eye for lifting prime examples of them from a sea of information, sharp summary skills, and a knack for telling tales not only with words but with numbers too.

Statistics – ideally coming from some original research and analysis as well – lends validity to opinions expressed, and gives a harder news edge to any text. 75% of business leaders say that when weighing decisions on whether to buy from particular providers of goods and services, reliable research is influential in helping them make up their minds.

I brake for numbers

Monetary figures related to cost invested or ROI, or just about anything, really, lends validity to text that otherwise may seem interestingly thematic, but ultimately abstract for lacking hard data. Numbers give readers and viewers information to add to the key messages that they form in their minds, and reinforce a story’s main message.

Visualize this

The brain processes graphic images around 60 times quicker than words. A few words employed as labels in colorful pie charts, infographics and tables can convey ideas more dramatically, clearly and memorably than words alone. Images can therefore lend credibility in an age where it’s needed: a survey of 1,000 PR professionals responded that getting customers and audiences to trust you was one of the most significant challenges they faced when making marketing campaigns. Seeing is believing.

Public relations professionals must cope with a complicated work environment that even more than usual now calls on them to be adaptive to disruption and ready to shift their core skills onto new platforms, even when the ground beneath their feet is giving way. Customers in the Information Age are making a majority of buying decisions that are, ultimately, based on emotional factors, says a partner at a big B2B marketing firm.

Buyers want a good story, and to develop a connection with a company before committing to a purchase. Trust and authenticity matters, not slick marketing. Just make sure what you say is interesting: in the B2B world in particular, boredom has become a significant factor to overcome, as prudence too often overrides the need to take bold action when called for.

I heard it through the grapevine

Beyond the sometimes overhyped influence of influencers on social media and the like lies the commonsense persuasive power that comes from word of mouth. Conversations with friends and colleagues count as much as online influence, according to a study from data and analytics firm Engagement Labs. Face-to-face sharing also tends to allow people to exchange thoughts on a wider range of products and services, and in ways in which we are freed up from online values in terms of showing awareness of what’s trending, getting wrapped up in “social signaling” or being in broadcast mode. Offline, you are more likely to give unfiltered, no-nonsense advice, and on products (like laundry soap) you may not necessarily feel the need to tweet about.

If your product is good enough and the story to sell it is touching, the hard work is already done.

Public Relations may have been given a bad rep in the past as most members of the public only notice it when someone is on TV explaining that their actions are not to blame for something. It’s perceived by many as being something of a dark art.

In reality however, public relations is not any of these things. It only defines the way in which we manage our messages to the wider world. It is not something that is used only in times of crisis, but instead should be something that amplifies good actions and provide consumer-relevant information.

Still, there remains a disconnect between brands and their interests and those of consumers (and ‘news consumers’) that has distorted the relationship somewhat between the PR pro of the past and what it takes to achieve connectivity with today’s audiences.

New Decade, New Era, New PR

PR is now a well-placed industry to support tech-savvy and hyper-personalized messaging in the digital age. It’s a two-sided deal now, a discipline built on beneficial bilateral relationships between agencies, clients, media and online opinion writers, and media pros focused on specific industries, and ultimately, audiences. Hence today’sIntegrated PR.

The industry has moved well past media relations and press releases. The newly held belief in the ever-evolving PESO model sees PR strategy implementation now covering every element of brand growth via connectivity to ever possible permutation of expanding communication avenues – specifically Paid, Earned, Shared and Owned. An excellent strategy covers all of them.

Only a great PR partner is properly able to leverage each to the correct degree, and achieve what is ultimately the original aim (even, as it was, ‘back in the day’) – to bring your client’s relevancy to all relevant markets, and to contribute to the client’s success.